DDOS Attack Takes Down Russian Source of Canon Pre-Release Details

[LogicExtremist]

Right, so it's fine to 'flow off topic', but not to challenge egregious errors that then come up? There was an early exchange about the use of words, which was conducted (and resolved) amicably. Others then wanted to defend the indefensible. Well, guess what, things are referred to as 'indefensible' for a reason.

What did you, by the way, think the thread was about, other than the loss (temporarily or otherwise) of access to a site which has previously provided useful info on Canon products, as a direct result of current events in Ukraine?

The problem with political discussions is that everyone thinks they're right and everyone else is wrong, often missing the subtleties and complexity in between two black and white points of view. The result is that it just ends up becoming a religious war essentially, with each side having unshakeable faith in their 'tribe', while being certain that the 'other' is wrong or worse.

Despite the best intentions to stay reasonable and logical, when thinking creeps into the archetypal framework of "us" and "them" triggers, a primal, emotive , and innate biological response takes over. The need for humans to assume group identities has risen from a very real evolutionary need, and it's hard-wired in our brains.

The neural wiring for this tribal behaviors that makes the distinction between "us" and "them" is in the prefrontal cortex, which subconsciously makes this decision within 0.17 seconds. When making inferences about the in-group ("us"), the ventromedial PFC becomes active, whereas in dealing with people from the out-group ("them"), the dorsomedial PFC became active, so we judge people we don't know differently depending on them being part of our tribe or not.

That, in a nutshell, is why they don't allow discussions about politics or religion in most forums.

Oh, and the topic, yes, it was (past tense) about the loss of access to a site which served as a source of useful information on Canon products, due to the conflicts in Ukraine. A handy reminder that a conflict in this part of the world at this time will have far reaching affects for people worldwide, in many areas of their lives, beyond cool camera and lens patent information, such as the cost of food and fuel, depending on where you live. We've seen the supply systems in many countries get shaken by COVID, and the resultant shortages that occurred. The semiconductor shortage is still affecting many industries, including that of photography. There are many factors that can affect the supply of expensive play toys or vital tools of the trade, whichever the case may be, to affluent first-world nations, we've seen one, a global pandemic, and soon we may be seeing a second, an ongoing war...

 

[AlanF]

The problem with political discussions is that everyone thinks they're right and everyone else is wrong, often missing the subtleties and complexity in between two black and white points of view. The result is that it just ends up becoming a religious war essentially, with each side having unshakeable faith in their 'tribe', while being certain that the 'other' is wrong or worse...

Not everyone thinks they're right and everyone else is wrong. Extremists take that view but not everyone. There are even people in this forum who shoot Sony.

 

[dtaylor]

If you want to go into full 'fake news' mode, good on you. If you want to draw an equivalence between what you're (presumably) seeing on the news every night (and tonight will include the Russians shelling the largest nuclear power station in Europe), and propaganda around Ukrainian fascists committing genocide in the breakaway regions of the country (a claim discredited by every reputable source since it came up years ago),

Genocide? No. Attacks on innocent civilians which have resulted in thousands of deaths? Yes, and with overwhelming, undeniable evidence recognized by reputable sources including the United Nations. Equivalent to what Russia is doing now? No, of course not. But let's be brutally honest here: the current Ukrainian government, which came about not via election but by a revolution which eastern Ukraine did not support, gambled that it could use military violence against ethnic Russians and Russia would sit by and do nothing, forever. It also gambled that it could court NATO membership and Russia would do nothing when Russia has maintained, since the breakup of the Soviet Union, that NATO membership of former states of the Soviet Union was a red line. Not an Obama red line. An actual red line which would trigger a war.

So while I do not approve of what Russia is doing, and I am deeply saddened by the loss of life and the suffering in Ukraine, I refuse to pretend that this came out of no where. The seeds of this war were sown 8 years ago. And for 8 years nobody in power in the U.S. or Europe treated the situation as a serious one deserving an adult response and a resolution all sides could live with. At best our leaders made flippant, childish tweets. At worst they actually schemed hoping to gain something while gambling with peace, security, and both Ukrainian and Russian lives in the region. Everyone deserves to be thrown under the bus on this one, not just Putin. Obama, Trump, Biden, both presidents of the Euromaidan government, and a few leaders of western European states as well. A serious statesman would have seen the danger and defused it from a mile away. Or perhaps I should say from 8 years away. But the world has a potentially lethal shortage of serious, adult statesmen to serve as leaders.

 

[LogicExtremist]

Not everyone thinks they're right and everyone else is wrong. Extremists take that view but not everyone. There are even people in this forum who shoot Sony.

I'm one of them (person who also shoots Sony)! I have two Canon camera bodies, and one Sony, though the latter is a compact ZV-1, does that still count?

 

[LogicExtremist]

Genocide? No. Attacks on innocent civilians which have resulted in thousands of deaths? Yes, and with overwhelming, undeniable evidence recognized by reputable sources including the United Nations. Equivalent to what Russia is doing now? No, of course not. But let's be brutally honest here: the current Ukrainian government, which came about not via election but by a revolution which eastern Ukraine did not support, gambled that it could use military violence against ethnic Russians and Russia would sit by and do nothing, forever. It also gambled that it could court NATO membership and Russia would do nothing when Russia has maintained, since the breakup of the Soviet Union, that NATO membership of former states of the Soviet Union was a red line. Not an Obama red line. An actual red line which would trigger a war.

So while I do not approve of what Russia is doing, and I am deeply saddened by the loss of life and the suffering in Ukraine, I refuse to pretend that this came out of no where. The seeds of this war were sown 8 years ago. And for 8 years nobody in power in the U.S. or Europe treated the situation as a serious one deserving an adult response and a resolution all sides could live with. At best our leaders made flippant, childish tweets. At worst they actually schemed hoping to gain something while gambling with peace, security, and both Ukrainian and Russian lives in the region. Everyone deserves to be thrown under the bus on this one, not just Putin. Obama, Trump, Biden, both presidents of the Euromaidan government, and a few leaders of western European states as well. A serious statesman would have seen the danger and defused it from a mile away. Or perhaps I should say from 8 years away. But the world has a potentially lethal shortage of serious, adult statesmen to serve as leaders.

Minor correction, the seeds of this conflict were sown a very long time ago, over a century ago. For anyone interested in the long and tangled history of these two nations and their ongoing conflicts, as well as the basis for their disagreements, here's an educational article that provides some historical explanations and gives factual context- https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/ukraine-and-russias-history-wars

 

[LogicExtremist]

So you agree to "the USA and UK go over to liberate some people of their oil?" What case specifically are you referring to? To meet you halfway I'd agree that's an accurate summary of Mossadegh's overthrow, but that was a VERY long time ago, and it sounds like bunnyboy is referring to something newer and more common?

I don't really care for political debates, I'm more interested in actual history, and philosophy. What I'll say is that the US has a long history of foreign intervention, for reasons political or economic. It's well know that it's the standard approach to US foreign policy, no secrets there. There's even a long and detailed entry on the topic titled "Foreign interventions by the United States" in Wikipedia, the worthless, crowd-sourced opinion site, and it's not a controversial or contested page, so that's saying something.

Here's a link to a neutral interview with two US historians discussing the matter for more info - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/americas-history-of-intervention-in-foreign-nations

Perhaps other cultures don't really want a foreign power to impose their values, ideals and beliefs onto them. Now that's a thought. As the anthropologist Wade Davis once stated “These other cultures are not failed attempts to be us; they are unique manifestations of the spirit—other options, other visions of life itself.”

The history of empires is filled with their conquests, invasions, victories, defeats and often, atrocities. They all have one thing in common, they all rise, and eventually fall, just like every other great empire before them. If their intentions are self serving and less than honorable, then history will judge them accordingly. Looks like we're in the midst of the decline of one empire and the rise of another, and interesting historical time.

 

[LogicExtremist]

Has everyone seen the "politics make you stupid" study, there's a writeup here - https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/new-study-politics-makes-you-innumerate/ and also here https://www.huffpost.com/entry/politics-bad-math-study_n_4060350

The original research paper can be found here - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2319992

Link to full document in PDF form - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2861922_code45442.pdf?abstractid=2319992&mirid=1

Here's another related but more recent research paper, "At Least Bias Is Bipartisan: A Meta-Analytic Comparison of Partisan Bias in Liberals and Conservatives" - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2952510

Enjoy!

 

[Deleted member 381342]

Not everyone thinks they're right and everyone else is wrong. Extremists take that view but not everyone. There are even people in this forum who shoot Sony.

Go to someone that still believes in some kind of religion and try to get them to understand Santa doesn't exist. It triggers the same mechanisms in the brain that cause people to distrust the people in the village across the river because they are surely different.

 

[Kit.]

But let's be brutally honest here: the current Ukrainian government, which came about not via election but by a revolution

You say that you want to be "brutally honest", and then tell an outright lie. Why?

 

[takesome1]

Nothing in my posts made fun of 'Yanks' or their 'ignorance'. I was replying to you and telling you the context of something. So, by definition, you're no longer ignorant.

I am no longer ignorant to your opinion and what you believe. I am still ignorant to whether what you stated is correct, incorrect or misguided.

So a little light reading:

Name of Ukraine - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I am sure many Americans and others around the world didn't get this memo, and if they did they didn't really care:

"In 1993, the Ukrainian government explicitly requested that, in linguistic agreement with countries and not regions,[36] the Russian preposition в be used instead of на,[37] and in 2012, the Ukrainian embassy in London further stated that it is politically and grammatically incorrect to use a definite article with Ukraine.[1] Use of Ukraine without the definite article has since become commonplace in journalism and diplomacy (examples are the style guides of The Guardian[38] and The Times[39])."

 

[takesome1]

Has everyone seen the "politics make you stupid" study, there's a writeup here - https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/new-study-politics-makes-you-innumerate/ and also here https://www.huffpost.com/entry/politics-bad-math-study_n_4060350

I am so sorry to say this, but when you post as link from huffpost you loose all credibility. I couldn't bring myself to click any of those links.

 

[SteveC]

If taught in school I am sure most would pick it up in the same way you learn how to spell and pronounce the English names.

Do you expect grade schoolers to be taught how the Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Georgians, etc., etc., for hundreds of languages, pronounce consonants that are not used in the English language at all? And if so do you expect their teachers to know them well enough to teach them?

Being able to make foreign consonant sounds is a very specific skill and even doctors of linguistics get it wrong sometimes.

 

[SteveC]

There are even people in this forum who shoot Sony.

OK, I am very much anti S*ny, but even I don't want them drag them into the street and shoot them,

...

Oh, you mean the other kind of shooting.

 

[SteveC]

As a matter of interesting trivia, in reference to Beijing vs. Peking, Beijing is the Pinyin spelling; essentially the official schema to write Chinese sounds with the Latin alphabet (a laudable objective). However a lot of the choices are counter-intuitive from our point of view (more intuitive from theirs; again they hear differently because they are used to a different set of sounds). The "B" in Pinyin refers to an unaspirated P (as in "spot"). So it's actually not correct to pronounce it "bay-jing." (Similarly the J doesn't sound like the sound that starts "jump," but I'm going to focus on the B.) However, to their ears, the English B sound sounds more like an unaspirated P, than does the p in, say "pot" (which we aspirate). So if we were to actually try to pronounce it "Pay-ching" we'd most likely aspirate the P in Pay, and sound horribly wrong to a native Mandarin speaker; from his point of view we'd be better off saying Bay (because we never aspirate a B sound, and they don't give a rat's ass about whether the labial stop is voiced or not, just like we don't care about aspirating or not aspirating Ps). But it sounds more like their pronunciation to us to say "Pay." That's because the difference between an aspirated and unaspirated P is like night and day to them (while we don't notice), while the difference between B and unaspirated P to them is insignificant, but like night and day to us.

This is what I'm trying to get at when I talk about how people growing up speaking a different language literally do not hear things the same way we do; when we try to ape their pronunciations we'll simply butcher it because we do not even hear distinctions that to them are vital.

 

[Deleted member 381342]

Do you expect grade schoolers to be taught how the Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Georgians, etc., etc., for hundreds of languages, pronounce consonants that are not used in the English language at all? And if so do you expect their teachers to know them well enough to teach them?

Being able to make foreign consonant sounds is a very specific skill and even doctors of linguistics get it wrong sometimes.

I wouldn’t have suggested it if I didn’t think children were capable. Multi lingual children is the norm and not the exception in many countries. I don’t have so little faith that teachers couldn’t cover this topic as well as any other, in my lifetime we went from learning imperial measurement and weight to hybrid metric and metric by the same teachers. Now kids are given a iPad in primary school so they can learn from voice clips, it’s not the 1980s anymore.

 

[SteveC]

I wouldn’t have suggested it if I didn’t think children were capable. Multi lingual children is the norm and not the exception in many countries. I don’t have so little faith that teachers couldn’t cover this topic as well as any other, in my lifetime we went from learning imperial measurement and weight to hybrid metric and metric by the same teachers. Now kids are given a iPad in primary school so they can learn from voice clips, it’s not the 1980s anymore.

Children can and do learn whatever sounds they are exposed to.

Their teachers mostly can't. It's one of those things you lose as you grow older; and it's a genuine struggle to pick up.

Another example, many of the languages of India have four different, distinct sounds we English-speakers approximate as "T." They are, unaspirated t, aspirated t, unaspirated retroflex t, and aspirated retroflex t.

I heard someone demonstrate all four in sequence, and couldn't even hear the difference between them, at least not reliably enough that if they were in the middle of a word, I'd know which one it was. (And, mind you, I *do* know how to make the sounds, because it's a bit of a hobby of mine. But they sound basically the same to me, or perhaps at most like someone talking with their mouth full.) Now imagine trying to distinguish between two words of a foreign language, whose sole difference is one has an unaspirated t, and the other has an unaspirated retroflex t. Even if you know (from book learning) there is a difference, you might not be able to tell the difference hearing it. And if you repeat the word back to them and don't know you're supposed to retroflex that t and FGS don't aspirate it, you're babbling nonsense to them.

We have far too many teachers who are barely proficient enough in what they teach, now, to teach at whatever grade level they're teaching at. Now they're going to become experts at forming and distinguishing all of the sounds in the International Phonetic Alphabet (which has over a hundred symbols and still isn't adequate to the task) so they can teach kids to say Zhongguo the way a Mandarin speaker would? (And I haven't even mentioned the tones. Yet.) OK, so after the kids are properly trained--including the teacher being able to tell they aren't pronouncing the sound right, when the teacher didn't know the difference two weeks ago--the kids will then be expected to remember how to form those particular sounds--which they have no other use for--into adulthood. No, more likely they'll forget them, just like people forget entire languages they don't use.

 

[dtaylor]

You say that you want to be "brutally honest", and then tell an outright lie. Why?

You reply when you have zero knowledge of recent history in the region. Why?

Euromaidan - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Revolution of Dignity - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[LogicExtremist]

I am so sorry to say this, but when you post as link from huffpost you loose all credibility. I couldn't bring myself to click any of those links.

I wouldn't quote that media source for facts! That's just the dumbed-down summary in the Huffpost for anyone who can't be bothered reading the original research paper, which I linked to. Despite any misgivings about the media summary, they do a reasonably good job conveying the findings of the paper in this case.

 

[AlanF]

As a matter of interesting trivia, in reference to Beijing vs. Peking, Beijing is the Pinyin spelling; essentially the official schema to write Chinese sounds with the Latin alphabet (a laudable objective). However a lot of the choices are counter-intuitive from our point of view (more intuitive from theirs; again they hear differently because they are used to a different set of sounds). The "B" in Pinyin refers to an unaspirated P (as in "spot"). So it's actually not correct to pronounce it "bay-jing." (Similarly the J doesn't sound like the sound that starts "jump," but I'm going to focus on the B.) However, to their ears, the English B sound sounds more like an unaspirated P, than does the p in, say "pot" (which we aspirate). So if we were to actually try to pronounce it "Pay-ching" we'd most likely aspirate the P in Pay, and sound horribly wrong to a native Mandarin speaker; from his point of view we'd be better off saying Bay (because we never aspirate a B sound, and they don't give a rat's ass about whether the labial stop is voiced or not, just like we don't care about aspirating or not aspirating Ps). But it sounds more like their pronunciation to us to say "Pay." That's because the difference between an aspirated and unaspirated P is like night and day to them (while we don't notice), while the difference between B and unaspirated P to them is insignificant, but like night and day to us.

This is what I'm trying to get at when I talk about how people growing up speaking a different language literally do not hear things the same way we do; when we try to ape their pronunciations we'll simply butcher it because we do not even hear distinctions that to them are vital.

The J in Beijing is not exactly the same as pronounced in Jingle, but it’s much closer to that than the zh sound that you so often hear. Right?

 

[Jethro]

I am no longer ignorant to your opinion and what you believe. I am still ignorant to whether what you stated is correct, incorrect or misguided.

So a little light reading:

Name of Ukraine - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I am sure many Americans and others around the world didn't get this memo, and if they did they didn't really care:

"In 1993, the Ukrainian government explicitly requested that, in linguistic agreement with countries and not regions,[36] the Russian preposition в be used instead of на,[37] and in 2012, the Ukrainian embassy in London further stated that it is politically and grammatically incorrect to use a definite article with Ukraine.[1] Use of Ukraine without the definite article has since become commonplace in journalism and diplomacy (examples are the style guides of The Guardian[38] and The Times[39])."

OK, so you just (re-)proved my point. Thanks, I think ... I won't hold my breath for the apology.

I personally couldn't give a flying fornication whether 'many Americans' have ever heard of it, let alone whether they care. The point, as has been reiterated numerous times, is that this usage is now a real issue, as the question of whether Ukraine is a sovereign country, or a mere region of Russia about to be reintegrated, is coming to a crux.